Interested in blogging for timesofindia.com? We will be happy to have you on board as a blogger, if you have the knack for writing. Just drop in a mail at toiblogs@timesinternet.in with a brief bio and we will get in touch with you.

The art of stacked-up living

This humble contribution is reaching you, dear reader, from the pleasant city of Salvador da Bahia in Brazil, where I was born, and where I find myself spending the southern hemisphere summer. The city is the oldest in Brazil, founded in the 16th century by the Portuguese, the colonial masters at the time, as the country’s first capital. It has been spreading itself ever since over the peninsula on which it lies, with the windswept Atlantic Ocean on one side, and the quieter waters of the Bay of All Saints on the other. From my vantage point above one of the lesser hills well beyond the city’s Historic Centre, and on weekend jaunts to the farther beaches and to the island across the bay, I have been enjoying gorgeous views of this breathtakingly beautiful land of invariably sunny skies, and sparkingly azure seas lapping one’s toes with warm, lazy waves.

Blue waters, golden sun; if I were to complete the traditional imagery which makes up the colours of the Brazilian flag, I should praise now the emerald-green of its vegetation. Alas, it is becoming an ever diminishing sight in this booming city. Salvador da Bahia in my early youth was covered, northwards of where my grandparents’ house stood, surrounded by the orchards of my great-grandfather’s suburban retreat, with an uninterrupted carpet of pristine tropical coastal rainforest. My brothers and I would climb up the guava and cashew trees to eat fruit plucked from the branches, and go down to the brook at the foot of the hill to spy the minute silver fish swimming in the chocolate-brown waters; and right into my teenage years diminutive monkeys, no larger than our closed fists, who lived in the canopy, would come to the terrace’s edge if we left out some bananas to tempt them down. Today, on the very same spot, my present abode crowns the pinnacle, more than twenty-five stories up, of a high-rise building; everywhere I look there are similar towers of gray concrete and red brick springing up, a whole stone jungle of them having taken over the monkeys’ erstwhile haunts; and the brook has all the appearance of an open-air sewer.

It would be easy, at this point, to go into a self-righteous rant about the twin evils of reckless development, and of the rampant corruption in the local administration which has allowed it to happen in what was previously supposed to be protected conservation areas. (I can assure you that I listen to plenty of my fellow soteropolitanos indulging in precisely such talk.) But the truth is that with the relentless increase in population, coupled with the breakneck (if sometimes erratic) economic growth experienced by Brazil since emerging out of military dictatorship and opening its doors to globalisation in the late 1980s, the need for such expansion is inevitable; that in a city hemmed in by sea and surf on two of its three sides, there is only one direction in which this expansion can happen; and that, on the evidence of these assertions, and in mitigation thereof, the most efficient way of dealing with the necessity of this expansion must be indeed to stack up people into as many vertical layers as can be accommodated on a given horizontal plot.

And let me not, dear reader, allow you to imagine that it is all doom and gloom. There are still many pockets of green dotted around the city, and anyone venturing beyond its more crowded quarters is easily rewarded with groves of coconut trees lining endless crescents of pale golden sand. The many charms of the land are present and real; so much so that they continually invite one to indolence and indulgence, as this your reprobate blogger may testify on her own behalf. The easygoing nature of the natives is legendary amongst Brazilians, and audible in the laid-back drawl and in the many picturesque expressions that characterise the spoken Bahianese vernacular. The one thing people here are dead serious about is having fun; it is not for aught that the place’s biggest money-spinning business is arguably the Carnival industry, which starts getting into gear well before the New Year, and fills up all the weeks until the beginning of Lent with rehearsals for the big event, after which the Carnival musicians take to the road and to all the far-flung corners of Brazil, for the benefit of those who did not get to taste the real thing at the appointed time.

Looking around, one does realise, too, that stacked-up living is yet far from a uniform norm, even if that means that, at the extremes of the local housing market, large swathes of the poor live cheek-by-jowl in treeless neighbourhoods of modest houses of un-rendered brick and gaping squares for windows, whilst a small remainder of the well-to-do shelter in elegant piles with fake-colonial barred windows in leafy gated communities. Yet I doubt not that the future of Salvador da Bahia, as of so much of the overpopulated regions of Brazil, if not the world, is to end up resembling Coruscant, the capital of the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars saga: a whole planet entirely built over with skyscrapers.

Just as I do not doubt that, when that time comes, people will adapt to a life lived, in the absence of green spaces, mostly indoors, in the same way that killing one’s own food has become barbarous to those accustomed to buying it neatly sliced and packaged from the supermarket, and what to me were the halcyon joys of playing in the dirt will surely be seen, by my grown-up nieces, as a disgusting germ-infested hazard for their own toddlers. For proof, I offer up the following observation:

It is fairly easy to spot, amongst the new constructions, those aiming at the more upmarket clientele, by their daring architecture of jutting balconies, promising, in each flat, wide-open spaces offered up to the enjoyment of sunshine and sea breeze. Except that once such a flat is sold, more often than not the new owner promptly seals up the balcony, typically enclosing it entirely with dark-tinted glass panes. My engineering-minded brother, with whom I rehearsed this observation, argued that this was an entirely sensible practical arrangement, allowing those inside to preserve themselves, when necessary, and only then (since the glass panes can be opened) from the discomforts of excessive salt-soaked winds, or rain, or luminosity; to which I retorted that it would, in this case, make more sense for the developers to offer the balcony already thus provided; if they do not, it must be because they know that it is precisely and perversely the open balcony that makes the flat attractive to the prospective buyers with the wherewithal to furnish it with the bustling family and expensive possessions that then require such protection. Another amusing demonstration, I believe, that many people like the idea of a thing rather more than the reality of the thing itself, flat-dwellers in Salvador da Bahia as much as the next man or woman or, for that matter, as I, half-way through my two-month Brazilian escapade.